Federal Data Centers: Server Virtualization

08/01/11

The key to success with the federal government’s data center consolidation strategy hinges on agencies’ ability to increase the utilization of tens of thousands of servers. That calls for a virtualization strategy that’s well aligned with data center consolidation efforts.

Many federal agencies are already utilizing server virtualization, but there’s an upside to be gained through a broader, more methodical approach. The benefits of server virtualization include reduced energy consumption, lower maintenance and operations costs, improved management and provisioning, faster provisioning, and space savings.

A key technology is the hypervisor, which manages virtual machines and allocates system resources among them. Leading platforms are Citrix XenServer, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. Hypervisors are also available from IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and others, and there are many open source options. These products typically provide provisioning, virtual switching, integrated backup and snapshots of live virtual servers.(S3210811)